Roll the stone away! An Easter Reflection

I love Mark’s women for starting a journey they can’t finish on their own. They’re nervous they can’t do all the work, asking “Who will roll away the stone?” All they know is that unless they start their journey, they’ll never finish.

But our women didn’t know who would roll that stone away. It was huge, and it was a barrier. It could easily have kept them from going at all. Most don’t even start a journey like that because something, or someone, is in our way. Most of us stay home that first Easter morning, intimidated or afraid, or smart enough to know we can’t move that boulder. But not these women!

Here’s a couple stones that keep me at home all too often, disengaged from God’s mission in our world:

Fear: I forget I’m going to live forever

I’m afraid of being on the margins; of being different, weird, unique, speaking for Christ, being known as a pacifist.

James Cone asks the question in reference to the nonviolent civil rights movement, “What was it that cast out black people’s fear of death and sent them flowing into the streets, defying mob violence?” (Cone, “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” pg 69). The answer is wondrously simple: faith! Their faith, their trust in God, is what empowered them to overcome their fear, their very real fears. He tells the well-known story of Martin Luther King Jr, staring straight into his fear when a called to his home threatened to bomb his home. And than did it! He later said, “My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.” Indeed!

Jesus brings up eternal life to Peter mmediately after Jesus asks him, “Will you lay down your life for me?” He says, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled… In my Father’s house are many rooms.” (John 13:38, 14:1-2) Eternal life is God’s free gift to us. We may be called to live on the margins today, but we’re the guests of honor at Christ’s eternal banquet table.

But fear is not the only stone that blocks me from Christ and Christ from us…

Doubt: I don’t believe Jesus

I know I believe in him, and I know what I think about him. But do I believe him? Trust him? Take him at his word?

Many people would say that the greatest theologian, and most prophetic Christian voice, of the 20th century was Reinhold Niebuhr. But he himself said, “I am a coward myself… and find it tremendously difficult to run counter to general opinion.” (Quoted in Cone, pg 62)

If my faith doesn’t demand that I trust Jesus, than it’s a stone that’s blocking me. If I’m stuck believing in Jesus and am not being pushed to actually believe Jesus, I’m missing out on a whole world of religion!

But I can believe Jesus, about myself, about his infinite love, and still might have at least one more stone in my way.

Contentment: I’m not in a struggle

If our Lenten study from the margins has taught me anything, it’s opened my eyes that people of faith must be in struggle. We’re far too content with the way things are. Listen to what one Rabbi, a refugee from Nazi Germany says, “When I was a rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime… the most important thing I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent and disgraceful problem, the most shameful, the most tragic problem is silence.” (Quoted in Cone, pg 55) I’m part of a faith tradition that has for generations been proud of being “the quiet in the land.” Which means I’ve been far too quiet! Far too comfortable. Far too complacent.

I need a community to continuously challenge me to choose to live in struggle with the powers and principalities, the injustice and brokenness of our city and world!

But Easter is not a story about stones that block us!

When the women get to the tomb, “they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled away.”

The stones are gone! It’s been removed. Jesus is loosed on our world! And the gates of hell cannot withstand it. No weapon that is fashioned against us will prosper (Is 54:17).

I don’t need to live as a functional atheist, as if Christ were not me in mission every minute of every day. For Christ has risen, and my stones have been rolled away.

What if you lived your life without any stones? What if nothing stopped you?

– Not your fear of standing out- you could fully express yourself and be who you are!

– Not your failure, past or imagined.

– Not your gender. Or lack of training. Or the color of your skin. Or your age.

What if you lived your life as if Jesus truly was raised from the dead and loosed in our world today? What if you knew, with every waking moment of your life, that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead resides in you?